Healthcare
Floor Speech
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Mr. PERDUE. Mr. President, the world is more dangerous today than at any time in my lifetime. We face five threats across five domains: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and terrorism. The domains have gotten very complicated--air, land, sea. Now we have to deal with cyber and space.
But in that background, three times over the last 50 years, this government, under the leadership of three different Presidents, has disinvested its military significantly--under President Carter, under President Clinton, and indeed under President Obama. They cut the military by 25 percent at least in each one of those administrations.
The last one was extremely draconian. We saw the impact of that on our readiness, the fact that our modernization program had been killed, and we found ourselves falling behind what we ought to now call near- peer competitors. I would say they are peer competitors now. When you look at the money China is spending on their military, when adjusted for purchasing power parity, it is exactly the same as we are spending. And they don't have the regulatory overhang and they don't have the legacy costs we have here in the United States, so they can get things done quicker and cheaper. In the meantime, the world continues to become very dangerous.
Yet here we are in the second month of our fiscal year under a continuing resolution. As we now are becoming educated about, this is devastating our military and has been. This is the 187th time since the 1974 Budget Act was put into place that we have executed a continuing resolution. It sounds really easy. Well, we can't get agreement on how much to spend for the next year, so we will just keep spending at the same level. Some businesses do that, but in this case with the U.S. military, it is devastating because it locks them into existing programs.
For example, we did an audit last year. It was the first audit in the history of the United States of the Department of Defense--the third largest line item on our expense sheet. We did an audit. In that audit was found and identified by the Department of Defense $4 billion of obsolete programs that nobody really wanted to keep and continue spending on--$4 billion a year. So right now, under this continuing resolution, not only are we not able to give a 3.5-percent pay raise-- the largest in 10 years--to our military, not only are we not able to improve their housing, but right now we are obliged to keep spending $4 billion a year on obsolete programs that the Defense Department doesn't even want. This is ludicrous.
Right now, I would say we are in gridlock. We had 88 votes here in this Senate where we voted to approve the National Defense Authorization Act several weeks ago--very bipartisan, negotiating in committee. I was on the Armed Services Committee, and we took this very seriously. We debated, and it was a definite fight, but we reached compromise. We reached bipartisan agreement to support and defend our military and to make sure they are able to do the things they want to do to make us competitive and defend our country. Yet here we are, 6 weeks into this fiscal year, and we still don't have this year funded. We are under a continuing resolution that devastates the military. For six decades--58 years--each year we have been able to do that. Yet, this year, we can't seem to come to an agreement because the House and the Senate can't get together in conference and agree on exactly what it is they want to do.
That is all window dressing. It is no more complicated than this: The Democratic brethren in this body and in the House simply do not want to allow this President to spend another dime on building a wall around our southern border.
Let's put this in perspective. First of all, we have seen on this floor just in the last 2 hours two different comments: Well, we all know that building a border wall doesn't really work. It doesn't change anything.
Well, that is absolute propaganda. Barack Obama built 135 miles of wall. This body approved that. And wherever that wall was built, illegal crossings at the southern border went down 95 percent. That is not propaganda; that is fact. It is another example of the obstructionism we have been witnessing here since the day this President was sworn in.
On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, the headline of the Washington Post was ``The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun.'' Since day one, they have been obstructing this President. We saw that in the confirmation process here. For the first time in 230 years, we saw the minority party not waive the 30-hour debate rule and allow this President to get his nominees confirmed. It has been the slowest ever.
So we sit here today not being able to build the space force that both sides have agreed on. Eighty-eight people in this body agreed that we need to go ahead and start spending money and doing that. We can't do that. We can't put in the building blocks for the Advanced Battle Management System, which is so important to deal with the modern fight. We can't rebuild our nuclear triad, which is in absolutely critical shape. We can't seem to get at our readiness right now because of the lock we have, under this continuing resolution, on the existing contracts out there. As was just mentioned a few minutes ago, we have to go in and renegotiate all these contracts.
Last year was the first time we did not have a continuing resolution, and there was such a sigh of relief inside our military because it was the first time in a long time--over a decade--that they didn't have that for the first quarter of the year.
This is devastating. It has become habit, and we have to stop it. It is absolutely insidious. It is killing our military and keeping us from doing the things that both sides want to do because of petty politics.
We need to modernize our force, and we need to do it right now. This NDAA allows us to do that. We need to rationalize our expenditures to make sure that every time we are spending on our military, it is exactly what we should be spending it on.
We have a Volunteer Force, and we can never take that for granted. We have to take care of our people in uniform wherever they are in the world. That means working on their mental health, their physical health, and their housing.
I come from a State that has nine military installations. We take national defense very seriously in Georgia and always have.
People are concerned that this gridlock is endangering our country. It is time that we get together, pass this NDAA, move on the appropriations bill, and get this done. People back home are watching, the people in our military are watching, and more importantly, our potential adversaries are watching.
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